Nine killed as train hits school truck in Thailand

At least eight teenage schoolgirls and a driver were killed when a train slammed into a pickup truck loaded with students going home from school, hospital officials and witnesses say.

The pickup, used by an Islamic school to ferry students to and from class, was hit by a passenger train headed for Bangkok shortly after it left the station at 4:00pm local time in the southern town of Yala, witnesses say.

The dead girls were all aged 17 or 18, hospital officials say.

Police could not immediately explain how the crash happened.

Another seven students were injured, two of them seriously, while a third was undergoing surgery, a Yala hospital official says.

Rescue workers and police were trying to free more students trapped under the wreckage of the pickup, witnesses says.